Password Managers

I want to give a shout out to using a password manager. Ye olde days of using junk passwords like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331” and “dadof3g8kids” just isn’t going to cut it in today’s online world, especially now that hackers use computers that can brute force guesses at 8 billion guesses per second. (Those two passwords mentioned were cracked in a matter of minutes)

Strong Passwords

A few years ago, I would have thought that dadof3g8kids would have been just fine. However, with today’s cracking programs like Hashcat, the assault is on. Crackers today have lots of weapons, like dictionary lists, rainbow tables, and more importantly, millions of cracked passwords to make better guesses. People who use their own simple systems like a decent base password and then add something to the front, like adding amzn in front of Jimmy1995!@ for their Amazon password are tempting fate. Worse, if Amazon sends out a notice that a password change is required, what will the new one be? “1-amznJimmy1995!@“? Good luck trying to remember that.

Apple is releasing a new Mac Pro in the Fall. It has no internal expansion, so we’ll all be dongled to death. Sadly, I think this picture sums it up nicely.

Would you be concerned if your hard drive crashed today? Would you lose any irreplaceable data, like photos, work projects, or vital documents? What if you dropped your laptop on the kitchen floor or into the tub? Without a good backup, everything that is not backed up will be gone forever.

Thankfully, there are lots of easy solutions to keep all your electronic data safe from disaster. The easiest solution for me is the one that does it automatically, without my input. Out of sight and out of mind means that backups will happen without any actions on my part. This is good because if I have to do it manually, it won’t get done. Here are some quick, cheap, and simple ideas to keep your most important things safe. This post is Mac centric, but the principles can be applied to almost any OS.
Continue reading Are you backed up? →

I rarely, if ever, get spam in my Gmail inbox which is great. Spam filtering is probably the best reason to be using Gmail in the first place. However, most of the time I use Apple Mail to check my e-mail, and it has an unread count of all the spam sitting in my spam folder. When I glance at my inbox, I see two highlighted numbers: an inbox unread count, and a spam folder unread count. I wanted the spam count number removed because it was distracting me from my inbox count. Luckily, for those of us as pedantic as I am, there is a simple fix for this if you use Gmail.

We are going to create a new filter that marks all spam messages as read. That way, in your Apple Mail, Outlook, or even the online inbox, you won’t be bothered with seeing the unread count in your spam folder. Log in to your Gmail account online and click on the gear icon -> Settings -> Filters. Click: “Create a new filter” and in the box that says “Has the words” type: in:spam Finally, click “Create filter with this search.” I also check the box to have the new filter apply to the messages already in the spam folder.

Google will give you a warning, but it can be dismissed in this case. Now, the spam can mount up colossally in your spam folder, but you won’t see it or think about it and can simply focus on your inbox. Great!

What does Apple have in store for us Mac users? “Back to the Mac” implies there will be emphasis on the computer/operating system side of things (instead of the focus on iOS, if you hadn’t noticed the release of new iPhones, iPads, and iPods). An update to iLife? A new MacBook Air? A new operating system called Lion? Wait and see what Apple has up its sleeve on October 20th.

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If you have a brand new Mac, or will be buying one soon, it could be very helpful to check out Lloyd Chambers’s website on how to set it up to run in a very high performance, efficient way. Simple but effective ways to make your new Mac better are to get rid of bloatware, use multiple hard drives and make use of partitions. This is all best done the day your new Mac arrives so make sure you read his site prior to a big computer purchase. His Mac setup article is here (and just follow the links at the bottom of each page for the article to continue.)

Good luck and enjoy!

TobyLaura.com